Writing poetry is a much more powerful and destabilizing experience for
me than is writing prose. The former plays hell and havoc with my life
and mind. The latter is an exercise in sanity. That said, there are
certainly areas of experience to which prose gives me access that poetry
does not. I can plan on what I’m going to write about in prose. Poems
aren’t real poems unless they shatter — there’s that word again! — all
of your intentions.

In celebration of former Academy of American Poets Chancellor Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Ecco Press this November, poets Frank Bidart, Dana Levin, Robert Pinsky, Peter Streckfus, and Ellen Bryant Voigt join Glück on stage to read selections of her work.

Sponsored by Academy of American Poets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ecco Press, and The New School Creative Writing Program

Readings will be given by Billy Collins, J.D. McClatchy, Zadie Smith, Andrew Sullivan and our very own Jonathan Galassi, among others. The Queens College jazz band will be performing some of Larkin's favorite jazz by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Sidney Bechet, and Duke Ellington live.

For those who can't make the event, feel free to get your Larkin fix from David Orr, over at NPR Books. He wrote up a lovely piece entitled "Grief in Greenness" last week, featuring the two spring-themed poems from Larkin below.

"Coming"

On longer evenings,Light, chill and yellow,Bathes the sereneForeheads of houses.A thrush sings,Laurel-surroundedIn the deep bare garden,Its fresh-peeled voiceAstonishing the brickwork.It will be spring soon,It will be spring soon —And I, whose childhoodIs a forgotten boredom,Feel like a childWho comes on a sceneOf adult reconciling,And can understand nothingBut the unusual laughter,And starts to be happy.

"The Trees"

The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too,Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles threshIn fullgrown thickness every May.Last year is dead, they seem to say,Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

January 17, 2012

POEMJAZZ featuring renowned poet ROBERT PINSKY and Grammy-winning jazz pianist LAURENCE HOBGOOD comes to Greater Boston, in concert and live at The Regattabar, Friday, February 24.

POEMJAZZ treats a voice speaking poetry as having a role like that of a horn: speech with its own poetic melody and rhythm, in conversation with what the music is doing. To put it simply, POEMJAZZ is a conversation between the sounds of poetry and music. POEMJAZZ is also a hot new CD, just recorded by Robert Pinsky and Laurence Hobgood on the Circumstantial Productions label. The limited edition CD with booklet of poems will be available at www.circumstantial.us and at Robert and Laurence's POEMJAZZ performances.

Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

There is a good chance that you have read something published by Jonathan Galassi. One of the wunderkinds of the New York editing and publishing world, at age 30 he was the head of Houghton Mifflin Company. He moved to Random House and then to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is now president, and he was also the poetry editor of the Paris Review for a decade. Alongside nurturing contemporary poetry and new American writers, he is a poet himself and a translator of Eugenio Montale, a late Italian author.

How have publishing and editing changed over the last decade?

Publishing has changed a lot because of the ways books are delivered to the reader. Not so much with poetry so far, because e-books are not hospitable to poetry yet, though it will unquestionably happen. But I don’t think the actual editing of books has changed much at all. I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.

Does your own work as a poet and translator inform your work as an editor?

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems—close reading—can carry over into how you read other things. I guess I see it as all one thing: whether you're working with someone on his or her book, translating someone else, or trying to write yourself. For me, one thing flows into another. And I find translating very invigorating. It’s fun to exercise your instrument that way.

You were taught by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Did they inform your interest in poetry at all?

I had both of them as teachers at Harvard. Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

The theme shared by the display of little-known paintings (at least on the East Coast) by the eccentric San Francisco painter and collagist Jess (1923-2004) and of artworks and objects made collected or inherited by the poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) is the often polymorphous nature of talent.

...

The exhibition also includes an attempt at assemblage that reflects Bishop’s admiration for Joseph Cornell; two paintings by the Key West primitive painter Gregorio Valdes as well as folk-art sculptures of South American derivation. But beyond Bishop’s own art, the most resonant inclusion is the small, skillful undated oil sketch by her great-uncle George Hutchinson that records a view of the Nova Scotia farm where she spent the happiest years of her childhood and inspired her 64-line “Poem,” published in The New Yorker in 1972. Toward the conclusion of this homage to immediate and remembered visual experience, one line especially encapsulates Bishop’s sensibility: “how live, how touching in detail.”

September 23, 2011

This Monday the beloved poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney will be in New York at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. Heaney will be introduced by Asturo Riley and discuss his most recent collection, Human Chain.

April 18, 2011

Earlier this month the FSG Reading Series hosted an exceptional evening with Robert Pinsky and Paul Muldoon. Now you can watch Muldoon read some of his lyrics, discuss “National Podiatry Month,” and debate whether Julius Caesar was a people person, all before a packed house at the Russian Samovar in New York. Enjoy!

April 06, 2011

We hope to see our New York friends at tonight's Reading Series at the Russian Samovar with Robert Pinsky and Paul Muldoon. Though the official start time is 7pm, we recommend arriving early, as those seats fill up quickly.

If you'd like a preview of Pinsky's reading, or if you can't make it tonight, perhaps these videos will suffice. (We cannot guarantee jazz musicians at the Samovar.)

Performing in New York City with the BU Jazz Combo

The Berklee Performance Center with Rakalam Bob Moses & Andrew Urbina

You can also watch Pinsky playing with Ben Allison as part of the Favorite Poem Project, and reading "Samurai Song," among others, with a jazz band at the FSU Writers Harvest (mov).

August 15, 2010

We're breaking our typical silence outside of National Poetry Month, and with good reason. For the August issue of our new literary venture Work in Progress, Eliza Griswold (Wideawake Field, The Tenth Parallel) has generously allowed us to publish three new poems: "Sabaudia," "Metamorphosis," and "Libyan Proverbs." The first one is presented here:

Sabaudia

The delicate Italian townpreserves its symbols—its sheaves of wheat and axesstamped onto manhole covers.A balcony presses past a worker’s windowin the same crossed shapeof wheat bound by wheat.Yet the white, weathered farmershave fled utopia. This block is letto gypsies and Africans.The cash crop is kiwis.All markets are black.Without meaning to, I filethese facts to show you,ambassador to a countrythat no longer exists.

In addition, publisher and editor Sarah Crichton chats with Ishmael Beah about his life since A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He discusses how the book grew out of a poem about his experiences, "Signal on Lion Mountain." It's an understatement to say Beah has lived a unique and harrowing life, and yet his writing is full of joy and warmth.

We encourage you to visit Work in Progress. And as always, let us know what you think.

April 30, 2010

As we head into the final hours of National Poetry Month, I thought we could look back on some of our favorite posts from the past few weeks.

Charles Bernstein, Maureen N. McLane, and Don Paterson each shared their favorite poets and collections.Louise Glück shared some pointed words about poetry month: "The idea of National Poetry Month is that it would be better to have a bigger audience. But I think poetry has always found an audience, and that audience makes up in passion for what it lacks in numbers. And that’s fine."Henri Cole undertook a literary pilgrimage to James Wright's Martin's Ferry.Adam interviewed some of the best and brightest poetry editors, including Meghan O'Rourke (Paris Review), Christian Wiman(Poetry), and Robert Casper (jubilat).

Our friends at Graywolf Press ruminated on the terrible hydra known as the poetry reading.

While poetry month is a great reason to collect all of the together, of course we publish and discuss poetry year round. Personally,I'm pretty excited about Magrelli's Vanishing Points in July.

We've been thinking about periodically updating The Best Words in Their Best Order after April. What do you think? Is there anything in particular you'd like to see more of?

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

Everything is going on. From very formal poetry to poetry that's indistinguishable from prose. There's multimedia poetry. Spoken poetry that's meant to be consumed that way. The auditory aspect of poetry is much more a part of the game. There's Dominique Raccah's site, poetryspeaks.com: they're doing exciting work.

It's about diversity. It's about multiple channels of expression. As the culture gets more unitary in certain ways, there has to be a countervailing freedom. Poetry is a place where that happens. I think there are a lot of affinities between that freedom in poetry and the Internet. The openness. Poetry is ideally suited to the Internet. It's easily digested, it's short, it’s easy to share.

April 27, 2010

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: In March, the poet Henri Cole answered questions from staff members at Ohio State University, where he is a professor, for their website feature "Booktalk." Cole's latest book, Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems, was published by FSG in March. In the interview, which can be read in full here, Cole talks about his favorite books, his least favorite books ("those sickening vampire love stories"), what he thinks of The Catcher in the Rye, and which works of literature have most helped him in his life. // Adam Eaglin

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read? I’d want them to read the ancient myths. There are some very nice
illustrated editions. I’d want them also to read lots of poetry to
appreciate the English language. I wouldn’t want them to read those
sickening vampire love stories.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you? You’ll hate me, but I didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn’t a normal teenager.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why?My feelings are hurt that you didn’t mention poetry. I like poetry and editions of letters.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Bon Appétit and The New York Review of Books.

What books have helped you most in your career?“Career” is not a word I like. Books that have helped me in my life are James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now, William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, and David Plante’s The Francoeur Novels. They all transcribe something of what it is to be a young homosexual in America.

ALAN GILBERT: You’re the author of over a dozen books of poetry containing a wide variety of styles—from rigorous avant-garde techniques, to a form of disjunctive lyricism, to rhymed doggerel. How did you go about selecting the work for All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, which stretches across more than thirty years, beginning with a poem from 1975?

CHARLES BERNSTEIN: Jackson Mac Low called his 1986 selected poems from Roof Books Representative Works: 1938–1985. The idea was that each included piece represented a particular structure or form he used. I think of All the Whiskey in Heaven as a sampler or array. It’s a constellation of approaches to poetry. Beyond the experience of the poems themselves, I hope the book brings to mind the possibilities of poetry. I’ve done only one other collection of otherwise published work, Sun & Moon’s 2000 book, Republics of Reality: 1975–1995, which brought together the full texts of a number of out-of-print books and pamphlets, plus one new series, “Residual Rubbernecking.” Rubbernecking is when you slow your car to peer at an accident; residual rubbernecking is when you stop and stare at the site of an accident no longer present. So I guess you could say that All the Whiskey in Heaven is a product of my residual rubbernecking.

April 26, 2010

Guest blogger Don Paterson is a poet (Rain) and editor at a publisher in the UK.

I read Jamie McKendrick’s versions of the contemporary Italian poet Valerio Magrelli when they came out in the UK, and I was delighted to hear that FSG is publishing them in Vanishing Points. Refracted through JM‘s bone-dry wit, Magrelli reads like an Italian Charles Simic—which is just about the world’s classiest arrangement, in my book. Also check out Magrelli’s Instructions on How to Read a Newspaper, which has a subversive little poem on everything from the bar code to the small ads; trust me, The New York Times will never look the same again.

Is it really more than nine years since Gjertrud Schnackenberg published The Throne of Labdacus, and can someone have her speed up just a little? GS really is a glory of a poet, and one of the most shamefully underrated in your country, if you’ll forgive a Scot for telling you so. Supernatural Love is never far from the bedside table. If you’ve somehow missed out on her, go read Two Tales of Clumsy, and wake at 3 a.m. to the sound of your own screaming. I know I did. On the subject of underrated Americans, I try not to miss an opportunity to rave about the late Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems, still not published in the United States. Yes, he was a dear friend of mine, and yes, we published him in the UK—but I’m pretty sure that even if that hadn’t been the case, I would have still claimed he was one of the great poets of the age. We all did; he was a huge influence on a whole generation of UK poets. Like Frost, he sounds light but reads dark, and his poems open up slowly to reveal themselves as constructions of staggering complexity and ingenuity. They’re like little self-winding clocks, built with all their fixed and moving parts completely interdependent, something Donaghy learned from Paul Muldoon. They’re also full of wisdom. I never fail to be amazed by his work.

What else is great? Everything by Kay Ryan and Anne Carson. Charles Wright’s Sestets. Mark Doty’s Theories and Apparitions. From the British poets, look out for Paul Farley’s indispensable selected, The Atlantic Tunnel. Also Alice Oswald’s Weeds and Wild Flowers, and a lovely, quiet, wise book called Grain by John Glenday.

April 23, 2010

Nobel laureate Derek Walcott published White Egrets with FSG this spring - some of you have seen selections in our Daily Poem Emails - and we're thrilled by the recent writeup in the New York Times Book Review.

Karl Kirchwey compares Walcott to Eliot, noting several parallels in their work and approach. He also writes, "All the more striking, then, is Walcott’s new book, ...for it is both visionary, in the best sense of that word, and intensely personal, even autobiographical. It is an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth; and it is a book of stoic reckoning."

You can read the full review here, and pick it up in print this Sunday.

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

There's a lot of convergence in the arts that's very fruitful and interesting. A lot of crossover. I've always felt that Lydia Davis's stories are poems. We often talk about the “poetic” qualities of prose, which I think means a very concentrated language, where the intensity of the words is packed with multiple meanings. Some prose is more open, where the forward thrust is what matters. But Lydia's prose is packed with significance.

The time may be coming when it will be difficult to tell what’s fiction and what’s poetry.

As a publisher, it's undeniable that it's easier to sell something labeled as prose. The system assumes that it's more digestible, that more people are open to it. So we sell Lydia Davis as a prose writer. But to me, Lydia Davis is a great poet in the sense we've been talking about.

Sometimes I say that one of our jobs perhaps is to "put really good books over on people." Publish books as more accessible than they really are. There's a lot going on in some of these books, but you keep quiet about it, let people discover it on their own.

Take Zachary Mason’sThe Lost Books of the Odyssey—that's a poetic book. It doesn't work like most fiction. It's self-aware, it's indeterminate, it's mysterious, it has a certain dispassionate quality to it. There's a strain of that in fiction, but it's not what we're normally used to. That mathematic quality behind the book is in a way a poetic quality.

We're calling it a novel, but it's not really a novel. It's a piece of writing. That's true of Henri Cole too. We package Pierce the Skin as poetry, which it is, but it's a piece of writing. There's a cross-fertilization among genres that's interesting.

April 22, 2010

Ohio
sure knows how to do spring. Everywhere the trees are blossoming-white,
pink, and purple—making me feel how abruptly life can begin
again.

Yesterday, I drove two hours with my student Ben and his pretty
wife Lily to Martins Ferry, Ohio, where the poet James Wright was born
in 1927 and graduated as valedictorian from the local high
school.

Martins Ferry—which Wright called “my home, my native
country”—is one of many steel-producing towns
along the industrialized upper Ohio River Valley.

Even in hopeful April,
I thought of Wright’s bleak lines immortalizing his blue-collar
hometown:

In the
Shreve High football stadium,I think of Polacks nursing long beers
in
Tiltonsville,And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at
Benwood,And the
ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,Dreaming of heroes.All
the proud
fathers are ashamed to go home.Their women cluck like starved
pullets,Dying
for love.

On the town’s lower plateau,
we crossed Ohio State Route 7 to see the stadium—where Wright portrayed
the local
boys galloping “terribly against each other’s bodies”—and then we
visited the
Martins Ferry Public Library on James Wright Place.

There was a book
sale and Lily bought a cookbook for one dollar. The library director,
Yvonne, greeted us warmly and showed off a handsome framed portrait
of Wright, taken by his brother Ted, displayed in the main reading
room.

With Yvonne, we walked down the street to see the town’s new
historical plaque honoring Wright.

And she pointed out that it faced the
library, rather than Dutch Henry’s, a popular bar across the
intersection, telling
us that this fact delighted Annie, the poet’s widow.

Driving along
the Ohio River, we encountered a family on the railroad
tracks collecting cans in plastic shopping bags. “The beautiful river,
that black ditch of
horror,” Wright called it in one of his radiant poems.

At a nearby
restaurant, we sat in a booth and Lily ate chili while Ben devoured a
delicious greasy hamburger with fries. The Martins Ferry ambulance squad
was there eating lunch, too.

Later, driving home, we listened to a CD
of Wright reading in 1978. He was introduced by Mark Strand, who praised
Wright’s poems for their
sincerity and lack of melodrama. “It may sound at times like despair,
but ultimately it’s not,” Strand said eloquently, “for its very
utterance is a victory in which the inner world of the poet is given
substance and the outer world of things is given meaning.”

The incomparable Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish passed away in 2008, but English-speaking readers continue to be introduced to new work as more of his poetry comes into translation. Last November, FSG published If I Were Another, the second collection of Darwish's poetry translated by Joudah. The Butterfly's Burden (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize from the Society of Authors in the UK.

Beloved by critics and readers alike, Mahmoud Darwish won numerous awards and is considered one of the greatest poets of his generation.

Upon the release of If I Were Another, BOMB magazine spoke with Joudah about his lifelong connection with Darwish's legendary work, from hearing it read as a child in Libya to meeting with the man himself only five days before his death. The full interview, from which the following was excerpted, can be read on BOMB's website.

Susie DeFord: What was your first introduction to Mahmoud Darwish’s work?

Fady Joudah: I must have
been six or seven years old, in Benghazi, Libya, listening to my father
or uncle recite Darwish’s newly published poems in Palestinian Affairs and memorizing them to recite them back, sometimes for pocket change.

SD: Why is Darwish’s work significant to you?

FJ: In a simple sense his
is one of the first poetic cadences I heard. So he resided in me from
such a young age as a memory I could only recognize many years later as
my bond with poetry took hold. He is also a unique phenomenon in Arab
and world poetry. It’s an amazing experience to have been his
contemporary, this poet who has already defeated death and achieved
artistic immortality, without needing the usual test of time. And of
course there is his lifelong dialogue with identity, with self and
other, with place as passion and as exile, as time and as ruse.

SD: You mention meeting Darwish in your introduction to If I Were Another. What was that like?

FJ: It was certainly packed
with the anxiety of knowing, as he put it, "this could be the last
time." But it was a pleasant morning and afternoon. We had a good
lunch, good wine, and talked for hours in a place at the edge of the
mall, where he would not venture deeper, because he thought it
resembled a chicken coop. He was brilliant with satire, loved humor. I
think he knew all along that those were his last days. He said goodbye
in such a beautiful way to almost all those who were part of his life.
I had the added strangeness of being a physician, and knowing the
extremity of the situation.

April 20, 2010

I was reading the lively conversation between Jonathan Galassi and Eileen Myles in Vice, and Eileen says, about living in San Diego, “There was a way in which you were really alienated from where you lived. There wasn’t a lot of conversation and there wasn’t a lot of encounter.” This reminded me of the feeling I had upon discovering Schuyler’s poems, those that became Other Flowers, which “live” in San Diego.

Here is the life’s work of this poet I’ve always loved and always known to be both intimate and exclamatory, his poems often about or because of conversation and encounter—even being the encounter itself—and his poems and things reside now in this city where everyone is alienated by design and is thus forced to make encounters happen. That feeling I’d had was initially one of some cruel irony. But as I thought of Schuyler, it began to make sense. In a way, he was always alienated and made his own encounters, whether with a Fairfield Porter painting, the first bud of spring, his gossipy friends, or the poems of Leopardi.

Now, two reviews of Other Flowers have — appropriately, mind you — mentioned Schuyler’s “prophetic” lines from "A Few Days": “when I’m dead, some creep will publish [my notebooks] in a thin volume called Uncollected Verse.” I am that creep, pleased to meet you. Having long been a devotee of Schuyler’s work, I was very much aware of these lines and duly considered them before spending four months wearing white gloves in a stuffy room, and five years of my life working on this volume, so that these poems might reach the audience they deserved, something I could not have done without the intrepid collaboration of my dear coeditor, Simon Pettet. It is my belief — and one that appears to be shared by a great many participants in this project — that, while there is no “The Morning of the Poem” or “Hymn to Life” in this collection, these poems are a necessary addition to the James Schuyler oeuvre we already know and love. I think he would be pleased.

Robert Creeley liked to call those of us who shared his life in, and
commitment to, poetry company. Over the last few years, I find
the company I keep ever harder to keep up with, just in terms of the
sheer and exhilarating range of work. Still, there is nothing I like
more than making my way through the wealth of new poetry books, both by
younger poets and so many of the poets who have formed my poetic
horizon.

April 19, 2010

For National Poetry Month, Elisa Gonzalez at the Yale Daily News sat down with Louise Glück, author ofA Village Life. They talked about such diverse topics as Louise's teaching at Yale and her personal fashion sense (there's talk of leather and Mick Jagger). We've excerpted Louise's thoughts on poetry month (spoiler: she's not a fan); I'd recommend the rest of the interview for Louise's funny, smart responses. // Adam Eaglin

Q: What do you think of National Poetry Month?

A: I don’t like it. And the reasons are myriad. It describes
itself as being a celebration of poetry, but really it is a kind of
hawking and forcing of an art, as though without that push from
publicity, the art would not survive. So it seems to me demeaning,
insulting and misguided. I think the art will survive. It always has.
The idea of National Poetry Month is that it would be better to have a
bigger audience. But I think poetry has always found an audience, and
that audience makes up in passion for what it lacks in numbers. And
that’s fine.

This year we've partnered up with GetGlue to give away a few of our favorite poetry titles to a couple lucky readers. If you're not familiar with GetGlue, it's a service and browser plugin that allows you to recommend books, movies, and music to your friends no matter where you are online. For instance, if you review Words in Air on Amazon, and your friend sees the book on Goodreads, GetGlue will tell your friend about your review. You can sign up and find out more info here.

GetGlue has devised a system where the biggest fans of a given topic - say, poetry - are deemed "gurus" and instantly qualify for our little giveaway. If you're a web-savvy reader of poetry, consider this a reward.

Joelle Biele is the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, to be published by FSG in 2011. We highlighted a few letters from the book earlier this month.

Sitting outside my poetry professor’s door, I noticed that the students from her advanced class were still reading the pink book. I had seen them, seniors probably, carrying the book before, through the corridors of the English department and onto the quad. Clearly, they had read a lot, had sophisticated tastes, and I was a student in the beginning class, hoping to find my way out of the dark and snowy rail stations of the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel but unsure what to read in its place.

Each week my poetry professor passed out thick packets filled with poems, poems like “My Cat Geoffrey,” “Directive,” and “Howl”—poems that completely floored me, as had the essays by Eudora Welty and E. B. White she'd assigned in Composition the year before. Anything she had us read was good, and these students still carried the book, which meant it was doubly good, so I had to spot the title without being too obvious. There was a certain coolness factor, after all. A student came out of her office, another went in, and we all shifted seats. The girl next to me rifled through her bag, and there it was, the pink book with the light green picture and the plain black letters: Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927–1979.

Either later that week or the week after, I took the bus to Harvard Square and bought the book I still read now, excited to have what I thought of as my first real book of poems. I was eager to sit down and read, eager to see what I might discover, if it would be the kind of book I would want to read in one sitting, and if I would want to carry it, too.

April 16, 2010

We asked poet, essayist, and critic Maureen N. McLane to tell us about some of the poetry she's excited about right now. Maureen has written two collections for FSG, Same Lifeand the forthcoming World Enough. She currently teaches at New York University. You can find audio of her reading her own poetry here.

I am, in a way, still in recovery from the poetry of 2009—or rather, still metabolizing the work of several incredibly strong poets, some very established and some newer, at least to me. Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959–2009 is clearly a, and perhaps the, towering work of the moment: his “Kill Poem,” from a few years ago, still makes my hair stand on end—a ruthless diagnosis of the spirit of the age. He is so knowingly, funnily, evilly brilliant that his power can be measured by the force of his detractors as well as by the intensity of his admirers. He is, thank god, inimitable. “I’m a liar with a lyre. Kiss me, life!” (“Pain Management”): youza! Seidel is our great poet of (among many other things) masculine abjection and authority, their mangled and mangling embrace.

Other work I’ve been absorbed by: Louise Glück’s A Village Life, with its stunning collective wager, its slowly and profoundly etched portrait of individuals in community; Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents (Wave Books), an intriguing, vertiginous, ingathering counter, if you want one, to Seidel’s sense of where we live now; Rae Armantrout’s Versed (Wesleyan), continuing her lyric scything; Mahmoud Darwish’s If I Were Another (translated by Fady Joudah), an overwhelming volume that will take a long time to settle fully in me—and one that proves the urgency and necessity and gift of translation.

On the translation front: I am immersed in, and fascinated by, Jonathan Galassi’s translations of Leopardi’s Canti (forthcoming from FSG in November 2010), and I look forward to assigning some of these rigorous, fluent, wholly modern lyrico-critical poems (as well as the illuminating, elegant introduction) to students next year.

Other volumes exciting me now: Ange Mlinko’s Shoulder Season, just out from Coffee House Press: I’d seen some individual poems in magazines, and it’s terrific to have the whole volume. The wit, musicality, and careening intelligence here are a boon: consider “Babyclothes made of camo— / There should be a Lysistrata in the forsythia” (“Camouflage”). Or “It’s hard to know whether today or yesterday was the full moon; / excitement isn’t rigorous. It’s just river-silvering / blent with the odor of silt where the roofs spike / along a repurposed waterfront” (“Children’s Museum”). Mlinko seems to be taking James Schuyler’s kind of precisely rendered urban pastoral and bringing it elsewhere—American English sings differently in her lines and mind. Then, too, certain poems are stationed elsewhere—perhaps in Beirut, or Paris, or Croton-on-Hudson, all alert to “the realpolitik / of utilities.”

For all the praise-and-blame hooplah around National Poetry Month, I am glad to see individual poems appearing fresh and savage and singing in various magazines and on websites: Cathy Park Hong’s “Ballad in A”; Robyn Schiff’s “H1N1”. And, as usual, I am permanently excited about Sappho, Anne Carson (have not yet seen her new book, Nox), Shelley, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens.

April 15, 2010

Throughout the month, FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

The value of the work accrues over time. What Frederick Seidel wrote thirty, forty years ago, is still as fresh, as relevant, as current as what he wrote yesterday. It matures like wine; it becomes more meaningful over time. We still read Keats's poems with wonder two hundred years later. Poetry is out of time in that way: a great poem maintains its relevance.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." That's Dickens, and that's prose, but these phrases encapsulate an era, and there's magic there. The poetry inhales the atmosphere and preserves it. Like a time capsule.

That's certainly true of Seidel. George Packer said the other day, "Seidel is the poet of our time." Seidel's attitude and way of expressing things encapsulates how we feel. It's like Baudelaire. It exudes our moment.

April 14, 2010

We've recently published Don Paterson's Rain, from which we've already featured "Two Trees" in our Daily Poem. If you're not familiar with Paterson, "a writer of surface gorgeousness who is nevertheless right at home in the dark" (The New Yorker), he's an accomplished aphorist in addition to his talents as a poet. We've highlighted below a few of his lines from Graywolf's Best Thought, Worst Thought: On Art, Sex, Work, and Death.

-Ryan

"The aphorism is a brief waste of time. The poem is a complete waste of time. The novel is a monumental waste of time."

***

"Some people achieve their humility by prayer and fasting, some by great charitable works. My own method is to behave like a complete moron every three months or so."

***

"Writers often end up humorists if they read in public too often. Barring the odd and worthless snort of self-congratulation, laughter is the only audible response we can ever elicit. The silence of the unbearably moved and that of the terminally bored are indistinguishable."

***

"Whenever he saw someone reading a bible, he would spoil it for them by whispering, 'He dies in the end, you know.' I'm always tempted to do the same to anyone I see consulting their diary."

***

"The present tense in English is too sibilant to be of much use to poets."

***

"By the age of eleven, I was finally exasperated with my parents. I knew I had been left with no alternative but to fuck myself up."

April 13, 2010

Lining the FSG hallways and conference rooms are copies of every book we've published. It's fun to take a break from present duties every now and then to skim the spines. We pulled a few of our poets' books from the last few decades to give you just a sample of the archive's breadth.

April 01, 2010

Throughout the month FSG publisher, poet, and translator Jonathan Galassi will be adding his thoughts on various aspects of the poetry world.

A lot of the recent poetry we've published has been about extending our range: working with some younger poets, or publishing selected poems by poets from traditions other than our own central tradition. It's fun to do those books, but it's also challenging.

I finished the Giacomo Leopardi translation, it's coming out this fall. I feel a great sense of relief because I've been working on this for ten years. It was the most difficult thing I've ever done. It has all sorts of problems, frustrations, and insoluble conundrums. But, you know, I'm excited to be finished, to be letting go of it. It was an education for me. Also this fall, we're publishing Valerio Magrelli. He's the first contemporary Italian we've translated in a long time.

There’s If I Were Another, by Mahmoud Darwish. And Durs Grünbein is a wonderful contemporary German poet. We're doing his essays The Bars of Atlantis. We can only do a few of these things. But I think it's important to seed the ground, to turn over the earth. To bring new voices into the conversation.

Mitzi Angel is doing very interesting things on the Faber list that, again, extend our range but are consistent with the Faber ethos. There’s Paul Farley’s The Atlantic Tunnel. Don Paterson’s Rain could've been either FSG or Faber, he is in many people's minds the leading younger poet in Britain today. Plus he's been published by Graywolf Press; you could say he's already in the family. I love his work.

Publishing Anglo-Irish and Australian poetry is interesting because it's our language but also represents other cultures. There's a kind of dual thing going on there. They're writing about things going on in our own language, but they also hook in other cultures' attitudes and traditions. We've always published Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, they're both from the "empire of English," and they're poets who've had a big impact on American writing. Internationalism is a part of the FSG poetry tradition, so we're trying to continue that in a different way.

April 30, 2009

This year for National Poetry Month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publisher Jonathan Galassi wrote a post for the blog every Tuesday and Thursday. This is his final column for 2009. I hope you've enjoyed this poetry month, and I look forward to seeing you back here next year!

It’s been a horrendously busy week, and I’ve been remiss in my posting. And now I see the Poetry Month 2009 is ending and I haven’t talked about many of the great books we’re publishing this year.

There’s Anne Carson’s AN ORESTEIA, her inventive and startling translation of Aeschylus’ AGAMEMNON, Sophocles’ ELEKTRA, and Euripides‘ ORESTES, a compendum of Greek drama in miniature that is endlessly revealing.

And coming this fall we have Edward Snow’s THE POETRY OF RILKE, in which he has gathered and reworked his maginificent versions of the great German, with an introduction by Adam Zagajewski (whose ETERNAL ENEMIES is out in paperback). And Louise Gluck’s stunning new book, A VILLAGE LIFE, and Fady Joudah’s moving translation of the Palestinian poet Mohmamed Darwish’s last book, IF I WERE ANOTHER. And the paperback edition of Marilyn Hacker’s translation of KING OF A HUNDRED HOURSEMAN by Marie Etienne, which just own the PEN Poetry Translation Prize. And last but not least, the first edition of Robert Lowell’sNOTEBOOK, one of his most beautiful and searching books, which is not included in his COLLECTED POEMS.

And more, too. I know I’ve left a lot out, but I have to file this blog or I’ll be killed (don’t tell anyone, but I hate blogs). We’re busy here—happily busy trying to bring you the best in contemporary poetry. Thanks for reading, and please enjoy the fruits of our labors!

April 28, 2009

In lieu of a post from Jonathan Galassi today, I want to point you all towards a poem of his recently published in the New Yorker, titled 'Lunch Poem for F.S.' You can read the whole poem here, but I am particularly fond of this stanza:

The dirty sunlight in the clerestorywindows of our faux-Parisian lairlends a streaky, half-forgiving glowto yet another summit with no purpose:duck and iron Pinot Noir and doubledecaf espresso, sheer necessitiesfor urban inmates who still keep the faithwith a wan cerise velvet banquetteand eye-level mirror lit with facesa John-the-Baptist puritan might judgecorrupt with too much liquid happiness.

April 23, 2009

This year for National Poetry Month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publisher Jonathan Galassi
has agreed to say a few words about our upcoming poetry collections.
You can expect his comments here every Tuesday and Thursday for the
rest of the month.

SESTETS is, I believe, the ninth book I’ve done with Charles Wright here at FSG. We did a couple at Random House before that, too, in the early eighties. I fell in love with his hypnotic melancholy, his never-satisfied hunger for transcendence, the sheer beauty of his imagery, and above all with his mesmerizing sound. Charles’s project is an ongoing adventure in that is one of the great poetic creations of our moment. Charles has submitted the substrate of his longing, his tender memory, his knowledge of loss and beauty, to many tests, formal, and ever seeking the elusive reward of oneness—with self, with the world, with the supernatural. SESTETS represents one of his most radical experiments, but by no means the only one. Here the test is to confine the poem within six lines.

Here’s one, almost at random:

Music for Midsummer’s Eve

Longest day of the year, but still, I’d say, too short by half.The horses whacked, the dog gone lost in the mucked, long grass,Tree shadows crawling toward their dark brothers across the field.

Time is an untuned harmoniumThe Muzaks our nights aad days.Sometimes it lasts for a little while, sometimes it goes on forever.

A song lyric, almost—country music of a philosophic cast of mind. Fact, reaction, image, opulent metaphor—and suddenly you’re on another plane, in timelessness, and it all happens before you’ve even realized it.

I first read Charles’s early book BLOODLINES and heard the echo of one of my great heroes, Eugenio Montale, in those terse, intense lyrics. Charles is more relaxed now, by the compression, the immediate movement from here-and-now to elsewhere, is the same. No one else does it with his inspired sleight-of-hand.

April 21, 2009

This year for National Poetry Month, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publisher Jonathan Galassi
has agreed to say a few words about our upcoming poetry collections.
You can expect his comments here every Tuesday and Thursday for the
rest of the month.

Yusef’s work addresses the biggest themes—life, love, and death through the lenses of history, war, and race—with a majestic breadth of gesture that in its own American way recalls the wide sweep of Derek Walcott.

Gilgamesh’s Humbaba was a distant drumPulsing among the trees, a slave to the gods,A foreign tongue guarding the sacred cedarsDown to a pale grubworm in the towerBefore Babel. Invisible & otherworldly,He was naked in the king’s heart, & his cry turned flies into maggots& blood reddened the singing leaves.

When Gilgamesgh said Shiduri, a foreplay of light was on the statues going to the riverBetween them & the blinding underworld.She cleansed his wounds & bandaged his eyesat the edge of reason, & made him forgetbirthright, the virgins in their bridal beds.

But the high point of the book for me is the amazing ”Autobiography of My Alter Ego” that takes up the second half of the book. Loose limbed, musical, it takes up all of Yusef’s themes—which means all possible themes.

Forgive the brightly colored Viper on the footpath,guarding a forgotten shrine. Forgive the tigerdumbstruck beneath its own rainbow. Forgive the spotted bitcheating her litter underneath the house. Forgive the boarhiding in October’s red leaves. Forgive the storm centuryof crows calling to death. Forgive the one who conjures a godout of spit & clay so she may seek redemption.Forgive the elephant’s memory. Forgive the saw vine& the thorn bird’s litany. Forgive the schizoidgatekeeper, his logbook’s Perfect excuse. Forgive

“Don’t forgive my hands”—that is a typically Komunyakaa formulation: powerfully direct, unsparing, and knotted with intense lyricism. There is a deep history behind that phrase, poetic, personal, historical. It demonstrates the power and resonance of this magnificent poet’s lyric gift.

Just a reminder to everyone that we're still planning to give away 50 copies of Frederick Seidel's chapbook 'Evening Man.' This is a limited-edition print run chapbook, and each edition is signed by the poet.

To enter to win a copy, just go here. Winners will be notified in the beginning of May.

April 15, 2009

Elizabeth Spires is one of our favorite authors for readers young and old. Her bookThe Mouse of Amherst was PW's Children's Book of the Year, and she is also the author of several adult titles published by Norton---Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker.

Her latest book from FSG is I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings.
This is one of the rare titles that appeals to children and adults
alike. It's an artistic and fascinating look at the life and work of William Edmondson (1874–1951). Born just outside Nashville, TN, Edmondson began carving beautiful creatures out of rocks from a nearby quarry at the age of 57. Throughout his life, Edmondson held fast to the belief that all his pieces were divinely inspired. And in 1937 Edmondson was the first black artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Elizabeth revives Edmondson’s story through her well-crafted poems---artfully
incorporating fragments of Edmondson’s own words from archived interviews. ---Alyson Sinclair

FSG: When and how did you first discover William Edmondson's sculptures?

Elizabeth Spires: I fell in love with William Edmondson's sculptures about ten years ago on a trip to Nashville. Edmondson lived and worked in Nashville in the 1930s and 1940s, and a large number of his carvings are still there. Some are in the collections of the Cheekwood Art Museum and the Tennessee State Museum, and others are in the hands of private collectors.

FSG: Why were you drawn to Edmondson and his work and how does it speak to you?

ES: I think Edmondson's style is terrifically original, like
no other stone carving I've ever seen. His human and animal figures are
vital, individual presences, full of zest and verve. There's also a
sense of playfulness in some of the figures that I find very appealing.
And at the same time, the work seems fresh and hopeful. There’s a
timeless quality to it that speaks to me of human persistence and
endurance.

FSG: What is your favorite piece by Edmondson and why?

ES: I feel guilty having a favorite, but if I do, it would be “Angel with a Pocketbook.” I like the rock-solid, no-nonsense quality of the angel, the way Edmondson gives a heavenly figure a very down-to-earth incarnation. She is a definitely an angel that a person in need could depend on!

FSG: What was your process? How much did you research Edmondson’s art and life?

ES: I read just about everything that has been written on Edmondson,
including several books that have been out of print for years. I also
wrote and talked with collectors and museum staff and tried to see as
manyEdmondson sculptures as I could, not just in Nashville but in New
York, Philadelphia, and Washington. I tracked down old photos and
slides ofEdmondson’s work from all over the country. Along the way, I met a few people who had actually known him. One collector had bought her Edmondson carvings from Edmondson himself in the 1930s when they only cost five or ten dollars.

FSG: What is your relationship with Edmondson's hometown, Nashville?

ES: My husband, the novelist Madison Smartt Bell,
is from Nashville, and we go back several times a year to visit his
father. So I've had a lot of opportunity to deepen my knowledge and
appreciation ofEdmondson on our trips. Recently, I found six of Edmondson
's tombstones still standing in a small hillside cemetery only two or
three miles from my father-in-law’s farm. That was exciting!

FSG: Who do you hope the book will appeal to?

ES: When I began working on I Heard God Talking to Me, I was simply hoping to introduce children to Edmondson’s
amazing art and life story. I thought his wit and humor would appeal to
young readers, and that combining poetry with photographs would inspire
children’s own creative efforts. But the project began to take on a
life of its own that outgrew my original intentions. Given the early
enthusiastic reactions to the book from adults, I’m now thinking I Heard God Talking to Me
might appeal to all ages—both to a general audience, and to readers
interested in American folk art and African-American history.

April 14, 2009

This year for National Poetry Month, FSG Publisher Jonathan Galassi has agreed to say a few words about our upcoming poetry collections. You can expect his comments here every Tuesday and Thursday for the rest of the month.

Today I want to say a few words about a young poet whose work has brought me a great deal of delight.

Maureen McLane's SAME LIFE was published last fall. As the two complementary and contrasting drawings by Sol Lewitt on its jacket suggest, there are (at least) two lives in SAME LIFE-- the life experienced and the life considered if not always in tranquility then in retrospect. As Maureen writes in one of her understated, often devastating lyrics, "Same View":

same view

same long lush lawn

same three tall maples and their lower kin

same windwashed lake

and beyond, the immemorial mountain

the sleeping granite man

still keeps his giant sleep

but I have come back

and I am not she

The changes that come into a life that is the same and yet not, the discontinuous nature of our experience which still contributes to a unified self—that is Maureen's territory. She brings to it a refreshingly spare, classically-informed modernist lyricism that hops backwards over several generations of poetic lingo to something at once modest, pure, direct, and commanding.

Maureen is also a gifted critic and her book BALLADEERING, MINSTRELSY, AND THE MAKING OF BRITISH ROMANTIC POETRY, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Her poems are brilliant, sometimes wickedly aware, deeply sophisticated, and amazingly moving. She understands sexual politics AND love AND death AND loss AND memory and writes about them all with the kind of clarity that engraves itself on the mind. There is nothing same-old same-old about SAME LIFE.

After Sappho 1

some say a host of horsemen, a horizon of shipsunder sail is most beautiful but I say it is whateveryou love I say it isyou

April 13, 2009

Today I'd like to share my recent discussion with Don Selby, co-editor and co-founder of Poetry Daily. I've been a fan to the site since 2001, and it's held my attention first as a reader and a student, then as a teacher, and now as a publicist (and still a reader) who works with many of the new poetry titles at FSG. From the weekly newsletter with updates on recent articles on poetry, the run-down on poets they will feature during the week, to the contest and conference notices, I've found PD to be a valuable (and surprisingly well-designed, non-overwhelming) resource. In the Q&A below, Don shares his insights into the making of one of the best (and first) online-only resources for contemporary poetry.---Alyson Sinclair

FSG: Can you tell us a little about how Poetry Daily got its start?

Don Selby: My co-editor and co-founder, Diane Boller, and I were working in a very different sort of publishing then---law publishing (for a company that is now called Lexis Publishing. Diane and the third co-founder of Poetry Daily, Rob Anderson one day presented some new technology ideas ("bulletin boards" back then, if you can believe it, but also the nascent Web) to a management group I was part of, which before long got me thinking about things other than new tools for lawyers and judges.It seemed to me that the web might help poetry publishers with thin (to say the least) marketing budgets reach the always-suspected-but-never-quite-recovered audience for contemporary poetry. Equally, it might help readers find out what was being published---not so easy in those days, even in communities with good bookstores. Shortly, thereafter, I walked into Diane's office for the first time and saw a volume of W.S. Merwin peeking out from behind Liability of Corporate Officers and Directors, or some such. We went to lunch, I sketched the basic idea for Poetry Daily, we began exchanging poems we liked, and before long we were using off-time on business trips to sound out editors and publishers like Joseph Parisi at Poetry, Peter Davison and Wen Stephenson at The Atlantic, and Jonathan Galassi at FSG, about the idea. We started working on it in earnest ten months or so before out launch on April 7, 1997.

FSG: How has the site changed in the past twelve years? What features have you added? What have you shifted away from?

DS: The design--the physical, graphical look of the site--has changed quite a bit, of course, along with the tools we use to publish the site, though we have worked hard with our designer, Jim Gibson (of Gibson Design Associates) to maintain a consistent look and feel. Our goal all these years, in keeping with our mission of bringing publishers and editors together with readers in order to help make contemporary poetry part of daily life, has been to keep the site simple and easy to use. The web has become a complex place since we began but its greatest virtue, to us, continues to be uncomplicated, free, democratic access.

All by way of saying that our features have remained pretty constant as well, providing selections of poetry and prose-about-poetry from magazine and book publishers large and small, along with current links to news and reviews from around the poetry world. Early on we did more original features than we do now. For example, we published a comprehensive original survey of current books about poetry writing, by the poet (and Shenandoah editor), R.T. Smith; an extensive feature highlighting Ecco Press's Essential Poets series; a month of poems written by David Lehman and sent to us each night for publication the next day, when he was engaged in the work that became The Daily Mirror, and an interactive feature that allowed readers to add lines to Albert Goldbarth's; Iowa Review poem "Library." But the point has always been to draw attention to what editors and publishers and poets are doing, not to present original work in the same way they do. That has kept us pretty simple.

FSG: I imagine your audience has grown wildly since 97, what sort of feedback have you received from your various visitors to the site and subscribers to the newsletter? Have any particular comments struck you as either highly rewarding or annoying?

DS: Yes, our audience grew rapidly from the start---the audience was there, and hungry, as we guessed, and from early on we heard from them, and from far and wide (my favorite was a note from a woman on a research ship in the Antarctic, when she read a poem on PD by a friend, thanking us for keeping her in touch with things). There have been some wonderful moments. I always think first about an unexpected onslaught of angry notes when we features Ron Padgett's "Nothing in That Drawer" (from his book with Godine, New & Selected Poems)----a sonnet that repeats the title for 14 lines; offensively, it seems, to a great many devotee's of the form. And on the other hang, a rush of positive, you-go-girl!-type notes from women readers when we features Kim Addonizio's "What Do Women Want" ("I want a red dress. / I want it flimsy and cheap, / I want it too tight, / I want to war it / until someone tears it off me . . . " (from Another Chicago Magazine). The most rewarding notes, as you'll guess, come from readers who report that they are doing just what we'd hoped---discovering poets new to them and then buying the books or subscribing to the magazine where more of their work can be found.

FSG: Is it true that you are not a poet yourself? This makes you a rare specimen in the poetry world as someone who neither teaches nor writes poetry, but is doing great things to help promote it. Are people often surprised when you tell them this?

DS: True! Neither is Diane. My first and last efforts were for (mandatory) submission to my junior high school annual literary rag. Diane confesses to no attempts to date. Our most valuable contribution to poetry, surely, is not writing it.

And, yes, it does seem to surprise, sometimes confuse, some people---from poets to publishers to editors to grant panels. It makes sense. We're hard to place, now that so much poetry publishing is done by people who are poets first. We're publishers first, and devoted readers.

FSG: Everyone is talking about the loss of print media these days, and in the book world this means fewer reviewers---especially for non-commercial titles. Since most poetry titles are automatically viewed as non-commercial (as in unlikely to sell more than a few thousand copies), we're seeing less and less poetry book reviews. Are there are web sites, bloggers, etc. that you think are doing exciting, intelligent things to keep the dialog going online?

DS: I have a feeling a great deal is going on online when you consider not only efforts dedicated to reviewing like Contemporary Poetry Review, but the traditional print publications that are making serious commitments to online publishing, such as the Kenyon Review and Iowa Review, not to mention publications like Jacket, which was online from the Web's Ur days. Bloggers, of course, are legion by now. Silliman's Blog is one I always think of---he has been at it for a long time now. It's becoming a serious challenge to keep up.

It's clear that something important will be lost if serious reviewing continues to decline; and blogging, even by serious people, seems to me very different. But, from the poetry publisher's standpoint---wanting to sell as many books (print or digital) as possible---the most exciting development must be the rise of online social networking. Even before the newspaper and magazine industries began their decline, it must have been tough to get one's book reviewed. And the spark ignited in a reader by a review might be counted on to spread by that longer-for thing, word-of-mouth, only so far. Now, word-of-mouth is suddenly possible on a new scale, and all but instantly, thanks to online social networking. Friends sharing with friends writing that moves them is always the best bet for passing the fever along in a way that results in a sale, it seems to me. Serious, informed and formal, evocative reviews can start it of course. But it doesn't matter how this sort of enthusiasm gets started---reviews, blogs, a lucky find browsing a bookstore or library shelf, "Today's Poem" on Poetry Daily---social networking has changed the subsequent possibilities.

FSG: I'm sure you see many literary journals and online sites as the Co-Editor for Poetry Daily. Any favorites for finding exciting emerging poets?

DS: As to poetry resources generally, I visit Poets.org (Academy of American Poets) quite often, I realize now you ask. And The Poetry Foundation site is very rich. As to sources, print and/or online, for emerging poets specifically, the perennial editorial task for us it to try not to have favorites in looking for authentic contemporary poetry to share with our readers. This doesn't mean that we will select something from every source, needless to say. But is does mean that we work hard at taking a fresh approach to our reading every year.

April 09, 2009

New York Magazine just posted a Kleinzahler vs. Herrera smackdown on their Culture Vulture blog. Both poets won the NBCC Award for Poetry this year in an unprecedented tie---August for Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. We're a little biased around here, but invite you to share your thoughts on this blog or NY Mag's site. (*Note: We would also like to rebuke the claim that August is grumpy. He's one of the nicest writers we know. Hope we're not ruining your rep by saying this, August.)

This year for National Poetry Month, FSG Publisher Jonathan Galassi
has agreed to say a few words about our upcoming poetry collections.
You can expect his comments here every Tuesday and Thursday for the
rest of the month.

One of our new poetry offerings this spring is Susan Wheeler’s ASSORTED POEMS, Everything about this book—from the title itself to Robert Lostutter’s brooding giant birdman on the jacket—is arresting and rewarding. To me, Susan’s work represents a bright, moving, highly articulate refreshment of poetic language.

She’s funny, she feels deeply, but above all it’s the washed-clean rightness of her very lines and syllables that draws me in. When you read her you sit up and take notice because every word is spanking fresh and hospital-corner neat. Nobody sounds anything like her.

Reflected Sonnet

A verdant swale appeared to me—disburdened of perspicacity—but sunset vaulted o’er. What kineleft the budded quicks will in timelack the evening star, bedded fastbeyond the gable-wall, and copsedin barn-light’s slumbrous, languid air.

From fane, then, to meet you there,Light glinting through the trees, and mossSoft underfoot, soft leaves, I crost‘til, gleaming in a bower’s frame, in golds, alit, the riverbank,long light shaking o’er river’s glass,charged me light where now you pass.

How arresting, and rewarding, is that? The sonnet just isn’t the same (sane?) when she gets her hands onnet.

I wanted to do this book with Susan to see how poets like Kleinzahler, Glück, Bidart, Walcott, and Wright read, reflected in her light—and vice versa. I think it’s a truly enthralling conversation.

April 07, 2009

This year for National Poetry Month, FSG Publisher Jonathan Galassi has agreed to say a few words about our upcoming poetry collections. You can expect his comments here every Tuesday and Thursday for the rest of the month.

Dear Friends,

It’s such a pleasure to have the chance to talk about some of the poets we’re publishing on the FSG list this year. Poetry has always been intrinsic to the company’s sense of itself, and that was one of the reasons I immediately felt at home when I came here over twenty years ago. I didn’t ever have to explain to anyone why publishing poetry was important. And not only important: vital. I’ve often said that fiction and poetry are two sides of the same coin, the coin being imaginative literature. I really don’t think you can have one without the other. That’s fundamental to our understanding of what we’re doing here, and it helps make the publishing of poetry a great joy and a great deal of fun.

When I was a college student in the late sixties and early seventies, I had two FSG poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, as teachers, and I remember vividly the absolute reverence I had for their work. Their books seemed like sacred objects somehow, and the FSG colophon, style of print, and jackets were all part of their seductive mystique. Forty years later that mystique lives on for me and, I hope, for others. WORDS IN AIR, the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell, published last year, is a distillation of the close artistic and personal relationship of these great poets who are two of the pillars of our list. This year we’re reissuing Lowell’s NOTEBOOK 1967-68, one of the books I remember being amazed by as a student. There are a number of Bishop books in the pipeline, too, including her correspondence with the New Yorker, and her journals.

One of our new books that I find most exciting this season is Frederick Seidel’sPOEMS 1959-2009, nearly five hundred pages of supple, savage, witty, emotionally gripping terror and delight. Calvin Bedient has called Seidel “the most frightening American poet ever.” Michael Robbins calls him “a ghoul,” while James Lasdun defined his work as "an oasis…in the desert of contemporary American poetry.” I think he is dazzling, memorable, scathing, uncomfortably honest, and monumentally tender, New York’s and America’s and the Western World’s twenty-first-century Baudelaire. Seidel’s collected poems represents a high water mark in the poetic achievement of his generation. This, I think, is his moment.

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me, The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows. Both men believe in infidelity. Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

This afternoon I will become the Evening Man, Who does the things most people only dream about. He swims around his women like a swan, he spreads his fan. You can’t drink that much port and not have gout.

You can’t read Seidel without having an utterly changed sense of what life in our moment is truly like. Seidel is a reporter, a scourge, a secret sharer, and above all a lyric master. Read him and be amazed.

April 03, 2009

Today's Poetry Daily Featured Poet is our own Susan Wheeler. You can read more about her latest collection Assorted Poems and find her poem "Air Map" here. Susan is a new addition to the FSG poetry list and we're excited to have her. She is the author of four previous books of poetry and the novel Record Palace, which was published by our friends at Graywolf Press in 2005. ---Alyson Sinclair